


pressure and a hint of pain

by screechfox



Series: a sharp-set symmetry [2]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Altered Mental States, Canon-Typical Violence, Dissociation, Do Not Archive (The Magnus Archives), Dubcon Kissing, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotional Manipulation, F/M, Mutual Masochism, Post-Episode 148, Season/Series 04, Statement withdrawal, some body horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-12
Updated: 2019-08-12
Packaged: 2020-08-20 05:36:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,757
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20222668
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/screechfox/pseuds/screechfox
Summary: Jon is miserable, caught in the depths of his hunger with no easy way out in sight. Helen just wants to help him put himself to rights, that's all.





	pressure and a hint of pain

**Author's Note:**

> you know when you just want to write a character having an emotional breakdown and it goes places you don't expect? yeah
> 
> god, helen is so hard to write

“You don’t look well, Archivist.”

“... I don’t feel well either.”

Helen clicks her tongue with cloying sympathy, running a hand over the discarded statements strewn across Jon’s desk. The ink blurs beneath her fingertips, forming shifting fractals that makes Jon’s head hurt as he stares at them. It’s a painful novelty, but anything is better than the numb dissatisfaction that’s been eating away at his soul, slow yet relentless as the tide.

He feels like his thoughts are decaying. Every time he tries to grasp for something that isn’t fear, isn’t  _ hunger, _ it seems to slip through his fingers and turn to dust on the breeze. His mind is rotting from the inside out, and Jon is  _ tired. _

(No matter how long he sleeps for, immersing himself in those familiar dreams with those familiar victims, Jon never achieves more than a half-hour of clear-eyed alertness when he wakes.)

“I did  _ tell _ you,” Helen chides. “We do what we need to do, don’t we?”

Jon laughs, the sound crackling in his throat like dead leaves underfoot in the bitter chill of winter. He opens his mouth to reply, but finds that all of his words have dried up into nothing. Another statement would help a little; borrowing someone else’s voice would give him enough energy to use his own. But Helen’s hands linger on the desk, dark ink leaking up her fingers and looping around her wrists, manacles of tortured cursive. Jon doesn’t reach for a statement.

“Honestly, Archivist.” There’s a strange sort of pity in her eyes, tinting them the inviting pale hues of honest kinship. “I can’t help you if you refuse to help yourself.”

Jon forces himself to take a breath, stale air sitting stagnant in his lungs.

“You’re helping?”

“I’m doing my best.”

Jon lets his breath go, feeling his chest deflate with uncanny awareness. It should ground him in reality, in his own battered flesh and bone, but reality means less and less these days. Jon is a tearing hollowness beneath his own skin, a folding paper construct playing at humanity. For all his skills, he’s never been a very good actor.

“I don’t need your help,” Jon says, more dead air and static than actual voice. With a tilt of her head, Helen smiles at him, so  _ normal _ in her pity.

“Are you sure about that?”

“Yes,” Jon says, and he nearly chokes on the ashy taste of the lie.

Looking back, he can’t remember when Helen got so close to him. It isn’t gradual, or he would have noticed it, but it isn’t sudden enough to surprise him — not until the moment she catches his chin between ink-stained fingers and holds him in place. There’s no pain, and Jon doesn’t know if that’s because she’s being gentle, or if he’s genuinely become so detached from his own body that the sensation doesn’t register as important.

“I think you do need my help,” Helen says quietly.

“Yes,” Jon says again, or maybe he just thinks it — a voiceless whisper hanging in the air between them. At this point, does it really need to be spoken?

“You’re very stubborn,” Helen continues, dragging one palm against the stubble on his cheek. “You have more willpower than you give yourself credit for.”

Jon makes a sound in the back of his throat, and he can’t tell if it’s agreement, protest, or fear. It doesn’t matter either way. Jon is held tight in his misery by the gentle threat of Helen’s grip, a soft violence he knows is reserved only for him.

(Once, Michael promised him a pleasant death. Distantly, Jon wonders if Helen would offer him the same kindness. Distantly, he wonders if he would take it.)

“I tried to have that willpower, you know. When I first became me. Helen didn’t want to hurt anyone, and it felt so  _ wrong.” _ Her fingers trace the unhealthy outwards jut of his cheekbones. “But you were so scared of me, Archivist. And I got  _ so _ hungry.”

Helen watches him in unblinking fascination, her gaze catching on every guilty flutter of his lashes, every aborted inhale.

“It all worked out in the end, though, didn’t it? For me, not for you — not yet.”

“You’re a monster,” Jon breathes. His mind feels hazy. Is he bleeding? Is the warmth on his cheeks blood, or the caress of Helen’s hands? “I don’t want to be—”

“Don’t you? A monster isn’t such a terrible thing to be. You could let yourself  _ hurt _ people, tearing stories from their lips until they’re nothing more than broken shells, jumping at shadows.”

Jon  _ wants. _

If he weren’t so tired, he might bristle at the kinship laced through Helen’s irises. But it’s hard to focus on anything that isn’t  _ now, _ isn’t his hunger for something that will finally satisfy him, isn’t Helen’s hands cradling his face, gentle as an unsprung bear-trap. Jon can barely remember why he hates her so much.

“Once, I didn’t want to disappoint you. Now you don’t want to disappoint  _ them. _ But this hungry cycle has been a fool’s game for both of us, Archivist. We are already disappointments by our very natures. No amount of self-deprivation will convince them you’re anything but the monster you are.”

“You sound like Elias,” Jon snaps, brittle as ice.

Helen laughs. This close, the low sound resonates in Jon’s skull. If he were human — anything other than ink and paper pretending otherwise — he’s fairly sure his eardrums would burst.

“I’m far more helpful than he is, aren’t I?” Helen’s voice is matter-of-fact —  _ always _ matter-of-fact, as though the throat of delusion has any right to the truth. It infuriates him on some base level, in the parts of him that the Eye has carved out and replaced with itself.

Fingertips trace the skin below Jon’s eyes, leaving ink in their wake like teartracks. Jon is utterly overwhelmed with indefinable sensation, even as that detached, hungry corner of his mind urges him to know what cannot be known.

“Christ,” he breathes, and Helen’s smile sharpens into tender cruelty.

Jon tries to grasp for more words, but they all spiral on his tongue with the sharp taste of citrus and despair. The fear he’s feeling isn’t  _ right: _ not fear of seeing and knowing, but fear of the ever-blurring boundaries between what’s real and what Helen is placing in his mind. Or, perhaps it is the fear of being known, at least a little. Jon is gripped with the certain terror that this awful creature and her fractal grip are the  _ only _ thing in this world that truly knows him. With a suddenness that draws his remaining breath from his lungs, Jon feels horribly, miserably  _ alive. _

_ “There _ you are, Archivist,” Helen murmurs in a low, pleased tone.

There’s a pause, if not a rest; a moment’s stillness where neither of them do so much as blink. Jon is snared in that split second before waking, on the edge of shining clarity.

Then Helen kisses him, her lips as warm and insubstantial as summer fog against his skin. She kisses like she’s drowning, and Jon is either the lifeboat to save her or the anchor to pull her deeper into the unforgiving sea. Her palm rests heavy on the back of his neck, and she pulls him forward until he collapses into her.

When Jon’s disorientation fades, there’s a dreamlike quality to Helen’s form. There is nothing but the memory of touch, intangible yet undeniable. Her other hand is solid against his chest, and even through his shirt, Jon can feel the shifting wrongness of it. He leans into it, embracing the pinprick-pain of her fingertips tearing through fabric and pressing into his flesh.

She exhales into his mouth, and the sharpness of her breath cuts at the tender flesh beneath his cheeks. The iron tang of his own blood is the most appetising thing Jon has tasted in weeks. He parts his lips a little more, breathing in her strangeness and letting it scratch down his windpipe and through his lungs. He exhales crimson, dizzy with his own kind of drowning.

Through her lashes, Helen watches him, and he watches her in turn. On the edge of his awareness, he knows every fractal truth of her — the ever-shifting faces of the Distortion, corridors that are never the same when you look twice; and Helen, with her professional outfit and waves of hair that seem to never end.

(Did Helen Richardson’s hair curl so much when she sat in his office that day? It’s so hard to remember.)

The totality of Helen — the multitudes of a terror of unreality that is older than both of them — should be too much for him to take, but right now the knowledge fits neatly into his mind, filed away into a category that defies categorisation. A monster’s delight creases in the pained lines around Helen’s eyes.

Jon is hurting her, he realises, just like she is hurting him. Helen  _ wants _ him to hurt her, he realises, she like he wants to be hurt.

She loosens her grip, letting him break away; her expression is fond and exasperated. Jon stares at her with a gaze that he  _ knows _ pierces her to every spiralling depth of her soul, and it’s like he’s seeing her for the first time. Helen stares back, eyes turned some nameless kaleidoscope colour, and the room spins around them both like a fairground ride.

“Are you sure?” Jon asks, lacing his voice with the sugar-sting of compulsion.

Helen shakes, and her image loses all pretense of sanity. There is a senseless universe buried in the layered truths and lies of her being, and Jon could lose himself in the knowing of it, if only he cared to. Maybe another day. Her image snaps back into place, blood running from her nose while she laughs in terrified awe.

“It’s less  _ fun _ when you ask,” Helen chides, her tone shuddering beneath Jon’s skin. Her fingers dig into the flesh that guards his heart, but the pain only serves to sharpen the focus of his vision. Her corridors flutter with something like a wince, but her smile is wide-eyed delight. They are dancing on the cliff’s edge of exhilaration, the hungry ocean roaring beneath them.

“Liar,” Jon breathes, the accusation rolling off his tongue with more affection than he thought he was capable of. “It’s— it’s important to ask,” he continues, though he can’t quite remember  _ why. _ He already  _ knows _ the answer to his question as easy as breathing — easier, even.

“Well, I suppose  _ you _ would think so, wouldn’t you? I could stop all those questions with a single slash of a finger.”

“... Would you?”

With a disharmonic hum that leaves all Jon’s thoughts escaping him, Helen moves a hand so it rests at the base of his throat. He’s fairly sure his collar wasn’t unbuttoned, but her fingers tap lightly against his skin all the same.

“We’ll just have to see, won’t we?”

“I suppose we will.” Jon’s voice is faint to his own ears, and he watches as Helen’s amusement tightens in the curve of her smile and the coils of her hair.

It would be inaccurate to say that Jon loses track of time. He’s not sure he  _ could _ even if he wanted to, painfully aware of every second that he and Helen spend entwined with each other. If Jon were someone else, he might liken it to a religious experience as the knowledge of great and terrible things presses into the space behind his eyes. But Jon spend six months held in the pupil of the Ceaseless Watcher, and whatever’s changed about him, he didn’t come out of his coma a spiritual man. He just calls the whole experience overwhelming instead.

Whenever Jon starts to relax, Helen finds a new way of pressing pain like penance into his skin. He hisses against it, blinking away the possibility that this might be the time she kills him.

(If anything can kill him at this point, it would be her.)

But there’s an unfamiliar sense of agency, like static under his skin. It coils around his tongue and sparks in his irises, bright and brilliant. He isn’t helpless, not this time, not anymore. He watches Helen until she trembles, until her corridors twist and bend in an attempt to become something newly unknown.

(If anything can unmake her at this point, it would be him.)

They stand there for a long time, pushing at each other’s limits. Jon considers kissing her again, trying to map the dream-faded impression of her face. Behind the blood in his mouth, he can still taste that citrus on his tongue. It wouldn’t feel right to move, though, a betrayal of some deep part of his nature. He just stands, statue-still, feeling the oil-and-water resonance of the power sitting heavy in the air around them both.

Finally, he wakes up from that trance of endless staring eyes. He blinks, and breathes, and nearly collapses with how tired he feels — a human kind of fatigue, a hundred bloodied pains making themselves known across his body.

By the way she tilts her head, Helen notices his change in demeanour. The spinning of the room recedes until he can almost convince himself it’s his own mind playing tricks on him.

“My legs are killing me,” Jon mutters. There’s a strange relief to the hoarseness of his voice.

“Oh, I’m sure I wouldn’t want you to be in pain, would I?”

Despite the cruel amusement of her tone, Helen is terrifyingly gentle as she helps him lower himself into his chair. Even discounting the thin lines and tender pinpricks where Helen has marked his skin, Jon aches like he’s one big bruise.

Her fingers are stained with ink-tinged crimson, Jon notes as she stands back. She wipes them on her skirt, and the fabric remains pristine and perfect. There is still a thin trail of blood running from her nose, and she ignores it, fixing Jon with an expression of curiosity.

“Do you feel better, Archivist? Have we kept each other in check?”

“Yes,” Jon says slowly. The world still feels like a dream, unreal and distant, but he is solid in himself and he feels… sated. His hunger has faded to a manageable want, far from the  _ need _ it was a few hours ago. “Yes, for the moment, I think so. … Thank you, Helen.”

“Always happy to help,” Helen replies, emphasising ‘help’ in a way that makes Jon’s cheeks flush. Remarkable, really, considering the way the torn fabric of his shirt is sticky with blood.

“Yes, well. I appreciate it.”

Words desert him, but this time it’s his usual social ineptitude at play. That soft pity graces Helen’s expression once again.

“Would you like to arrange a repeat performance?” The calculated innocence of her tone is sly and insidious. Jon should really say no and put this whole affair behind him.

Instead he leans back in his chair and lets his eyes slip closed.

“Surprise me,” he says, and despite his expectations, he doesn’t regret the words.

“Hm. You really are ever so unpredictable at times.”

Jon sighs and doesn’t reply.

There are no footsteps, but he isn’t startled when the back of Helen’s hand caresses his cheek. Her lips press to the corner of his mouth, and if he ignores the seasick rocking feeling the touch imbues him with, it’s actually quite pleasant.

Then her touch is gone, and a few moments later, so is she.

On the edge of Jon’s hearing, an eavesdropping tape recorder clicks off. He sighs again. Now  _ there’s _ a tape he doesn’t know where to file.

He lies there for a while. He doesn’t know how long exactly, and that’s a relief in itself. He doesn’t sleep — he can’t help but feel it would be tempting fate — so he just… thinks for a while. His mind is clear, but not too clear. Maybe even  _ normal. _

Of course, he can’t stay idle forever. He has a tape to file, a chair to wipe down, and a shirt to abandon like so much bloodied clothing before it. Life, despite everything, goes on.

As Jon stands, he catches his reflection in the plastic of the recorder, and his mouth is mottled with the deep purple-blue of bruises — or of spilt ink, pouring from his throat in an endless acrid waterfall. He licks his lips, unable to miss the glitter of hunger in his own eyes, and he tastes blood. It’s all the same in the end, really.

**Author's Note:**

> hope you enjoyed the weirdness that this turned out to be! if you liked this fic you might like [liar's comfort](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19990753) by me, which is kind of like this fic except with less kissing and more emotion. i just can't get enough of the jon and helen dynamic, okay
> 
> you can find me at [screechfoxes](https://screechfoxes.tumblr.com) on tumblr! have a good day!


End file.
